Here's what Professor Douglas Duncan, Director of Astronomical Laboratories, University of Colorado says in his 2005 book Clickers in the Classroom about explaining clickers in the first class (p44, p53) and about setting a policy about clicker grades (pp39-40):
Carefully explain to your class the goals of your course how clickers support those goals. Stress this early and then repeat it often during the term.
Discuss with your students why they will be using clickers. Describe how clickers typically improve student learning and enjoyment. (see Duncan's reasons listed here).
(Optional but recommended) Stress that genuine learning is *not* easy and that clickers (and conceptual questions and conversations with peers) can help students find out what they don't really understand and what they need to think about further.
Quote some positive student comments from chapter 9 (p 43) (see the same web page above for some quotes).
Discuss how you will assign clicker grades. Remember that students will start out focussing on the correct answer in each clicker use. If your emphasis is on discussion and learning the concept, tell them explicitly, and describe what partial credit you intend to give for incorrect answers.
Explain what you will do when a student clicker doesn't work, or if a student forgets to bring it to class. You can deal with that problem as well as personal problems that cause students to miss class by dropping the lowest clicker scores for each student. (this is also mentioned in the Clicker FAQ for students).
Talk directly about cheating. Emphasize that using a clicker for someone else is like taking an exam for someone else and is cause for serious discipline. Explain what that discipline would be. State that one of the things students like most about clickers is the feedback they get about what they understand and what further study they need. And they feel this improves their overall performance and exam grades. Tell the students that letting someone else use their clicker robs them of that feedback (p51).
Explain that on the topic of clickers, as about any topic in class, students can email any questions to you.
Students expect to be rewarded for work done.
Give marks even for wrong answers if increasing class participation is a goal e.g. 2 points for a right answer, 1 point for a wrong answer and 0 points for no answer.
A common policy to handle broken or otherwise "missing" clickers in class is to discard the lowest N clicker grades, where N is in the range of the number of clicker questions asked in 1 to 2 classes.
Make up a few non-credit "icebreaker" questions to use in a non-graded way to let students practice clicker use in your first classes. You might consider surveying your students about their expectations for the class.
Using only "bonus" marks for clicker answers doesn't seem to help decrease student worry about clicker grading.
A value of 5-10% of the overall grade is common. The higher the value, the greater the mark anxiety. The lower the value, the less interest to start with in using clickers.
At UW, some courses offer only participation marks for answering questions, right or wrong. In others, there are additional marks for answering correctly. Clicker use can vary from light to heavy in a course, as desired. Typically, clickers are given from 1% to 5% of the course grade, but it can be more when they are more heavily used.
At UW clickers are sometimes optional, but recommended. In this case, the instructor will be using clickers to enrich the classroom experience but leave open the possibility of allocating the portion of marks set aside for clickers to another type of course assessment, such as a midterm or final exam.
Also, the grading scheme typically makes allowance for the usual problems of a forgotten clicker or missed class. For example, sometimes the best 80% to 90% of lecture answers are used for the clicker grade.
Paul Kates
Mathematics Faculty CTE Liaison
pkates@uwaterloo.ca, x37047
Last modification date: Mon Apr 23 22:39:33 2012.